‘13th Urdu Conference was vaccine against despair in times of corona’

Speakers showered praise on the organising team of the four-day 13th International Urdu Conference 2020 at its concluding ceremony on Sunday for successfully pulling off such a major event during the times of the coronavirus pandemic.

As the conference concluded on Sunday night, playwright Haseena Moin said the success of the event indicated that our country was fully awake and it will exist forever. She said earlier thousands of people used to attend the conference in person but this time hundreds of thousands watched it online from all over the world.

Actor Munawwar Saeed gave the credit for this year’s conference to Arts Council President Ahmed Shah, who, despite all the constraints due to the pandemic, stood firm in his resolve to continue with the grand literary tradition of the Urdu Conference and organised the event with following the standard operating procedures announced by the government.

To fiction writer Noorul Huda Shah, the Urdu Conference was like a vaccine in the times of the pandemic that gave hope to the anxious people. She said speakers of the country’s all languages were present at the conference and the event had brought the people closer.

Ahmed Shah thanked all the participants and viewers of the event and called it a teamwork. He said if the pandemic situation came under control in March, the Arts Council would hold a national cultural conference.

Playwright and satirist Anwar Maqsood also addressed the concluding ceremony in his typical humorous style, which entertained the audience.

Literature for children

On the last day of the 13th International Urdu Conference on Sunday, literary figures in a session contemplated what kids, years from now, might need in terms of content consumption and what Urdu literature, in particular, holds for them.

The last hundred year of Urdu literature for children weren’t hopeless as new writers and poets kept emerging, maintained the participants of the session titled ‘Bacho ka Adab [Literature for children]. The discussion was moderated by the editor of children’s magazine ‘Jungle Mangle’ and writer Ali Hassan Sajid.

Writer Nayar Rubab discussed the role of the technological revolution in Urdu literature. “The literature for children has always remained in the form of stories,” she said adding that fantasies they fostered in their childhood held little to no difference than fantasies of children today.

Back then, she said there used to be fairies or jinn (spirits or demons) “but now they have Superman and Captain Planet”. If not a flying carpet, she added, they have had space shuttles.

“Fantasies are the same. It’s just the genre that has transformed,” she said. Rubab advised the writers to use contemporary phenomenon relatable to the children of this age.

As for the future of Urdu literature, she expressed hope but said an important part was how the literature was marketed. “The basic buyer is children,” she said adding that proper campaigning could make literature reach children at the grassroots level.

Sajid moved on to say how difficult it had become to publish Urdu magazines in Pakistan due to diminishing advertisement and increasing printing cost. “But”, he said, “there’s technology in the form of web channels, such as YouTube, which are replacing magazines.”

On this point, he asked writer and media consultant Saleem Mughal about the future of the Urdu literature for children. In his response, Mughal went on to explain that when the canvas of business enhanced, big players jumped in and subsequently it damaged the values of our society. “In American literature, topics that are taboo in our society, are touched in literature for children, but the inclusion of such are criticised by some conservative American families. Such content will affect children globally.”

The Urdu literature, he added, was full of content for children since the last century. “Ghulam Abbas wrote books for children, such as Qurat ul ain, April Fool, Jila Watan, Andha Faqeer and Ek Ankh Wala Dyo. Even Krishan Chander and Asmat Chughtai wrote for the children.”

Meanwhile, Sajid shared how for his magazine ‘Jungle Mungle’ he had started some research work and came to know how much Faiz Ahmed Faiz had contributed to the literature for children.

“But it was all scattered,” he said. “When Sajid gathered all that content, he shared it became a magazine of 150 pages, which had poems and stories for children.

“Hafeez Jalandhari,” he said, “wrote 34 novels for children in 1937, out of which six were those which were never published. Actor Kamal Ahmed Rizvi has also written

for children.”